Manage your subscription

Turning Star Trek’s medical tricorder into reality

Is a foolproof, smartphone-sized device that diagnoses diseases a pipe dream – or can a $10 million competition turn the fiction into a lifesaver?

By Phil McKenna

(Image: Patrick George)

HAZEL – as we’ll call her – knew something was wrong when, in her mid-50s, she started to feel short of breath at the slightest exertion. Over the next few months, she felt increasingly achy, but several medical visits and an X-ray suggested only arthritis. More troubling symptoms appeared&colon; a persistent cough, a sore knee and tender lungs.

Whether we have had to deal with worrying symptoms or not, at some point we have all found ourselves, like Hazel, wondering what’s happening inside our own bodies. Maybe you want to know whether that cough will become a garden-variety cold or debilitating flu, or whether your child has an ear infection. At present, the only way to find out is to see a doctor. What if there were a gadget that could offer a reliable home diagnosis?

Such a device could be in your hands sooner than you think. In January last year, the X Prize Foundation partnered with communications giant Qualcomm to launch a &dollar;10 million competition to develop a pocket medical diagnostic tool, to be ready in mid-2015, that previously existed only in science fiction. The contest’s organisers say they want to usher in a new era of medical technology, one that would revolutionise healthcare in the face of spiralling costs and, in the US, a steady fall in the number of doctors providing primary care. But just how many of a physician’s complex duties can be turned over to technology?

Announcing the contest last year, Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation said that the guidelines were inspired by the “medical tricorder” featured …